Video transcript

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: We're in the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. We're looking at a
really early Thomas Cole. This is the
"Expulsion from Eden." DR. BETH HARRIS: Normally when
we think about that subject, we might think about images
from the Italian Renaissance, like Masaccio's "Expulsion
from the Garden of Eden" or the "Expulsion"
by Michelangelo on the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel. Those are paintings of Adam
and Eve, of the two figures. But Cole has transformed this
into a landscape painting. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: We can
barely find Adam and Eve. It takes us a moment, in part
because they're so small. But he has given us this
over-the-top operatic treatment that starkly contrasts
the garden that is Eden, God's paradise, with
the terror of the wilderness beyond. I read this painting from right
to left instead of from left to right. I begin in the brighter Eden. And Cole has given us
this fantastic vista. We can see these
crystalline mountains that reach up to Heaven
and then slope down to these lovely glades
and a tropical paradise. And as we move towards
the foreground, we can just make out
two swans in a pool. DR. BETH HARRIS: We
even see waterfalls down those purplish mountains. And this whole area of
Eden is flooded with light. And everything seems
verdant and lush. But that's contrasted
with the left side of the painting, where we see
Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden. And we feel a blast of
light that expels them from the Garden of
Eden that obviously represents a divine force. Nature is much bleaker. Trees have been struck by
lightning and ravaged by time. The colors are
browns, and there's sharp contrasts
of light and dark. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
You can actually see a storm in the sky
that frames a volcano. Adam holds his hand
up to this forehead. Eve clutches at his hand. They know they're
in deep trouble. And as if to make
that point even more clearly, in the lower
left, we see a wild animal that's felled a deer
and is protecting it against an approaching vulture. This new culture, this
new American nation, did not have what Europe had. It did not have ancient ruins. It did not have
ancient cultures. But at the beginning
of the 19th century, philosophers, and
writers, and painters began to recognize that its
wilderness was, in a sense, its great heritage. DR. BETH HARRIS: That's
right, but American painters knew that landscape
was a low kind of art in the hierarchy established
by the academies in Europe. They knew that landscape
was looked down on. And one way that you
could ennoble a landscape and raise it up
to a higher level, to the level of a
history painting, was to make it the setting
for heroic human endeavor for biblical stories. And that's exactly
what Cole has done. American artists are always
wanting to be taken seriously. But because of the artistic
situation in America, they're often forced
to paint subjects that their clients
want, which are not the noblest subjects-- simple
landscapes and portraits. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: So
this painting in some ways might have been a challenge
to its American public, who were used to more
prosaic images. And here, Cole is attempting
something more ambitious. DR. BETH HARRIS: Cole wants
to be a serious painter. And he can't do that by
simply painting the Catskills, as he's going to later do. He returns again and again to
these more serious subjects, "The Voyage of Life,"
"The Course of Empire." DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
But all stories that can be enacted
in the landscape.